n a gritty Rome neighborhood, a soup kitchen is serving up
lip-smacking gourmet food donated from a famous delicatessen as
part of a new initiative to combat food waste and feed a growing
need in recession-hit Italy.
“Of course it’s good. This is a VIP soup kitchen. We get a first
course, second course and dessert. It’s like a trattoria,”
Alessandro, a homeless Moldovan builder, told reporters as he ate a
sorbet in the San Benedetto Parish canteen.
Organizers of the project, called “Pasto Buono” (Good Meal),
contact gourmet grocers and restaurants that throw out scraps and
day-old food and puts them in touch with organizations that run
soup kitchens like Catholic charity Caritas.
Regular runs are arranged. One goes daily from the luxury eatery
Volpetti — a destination for fine diners — to the nearby Caritas
canteen at San Benedetto in Ostiense, a dilapidated former
industrial quarter south of Rome’s city center.
Pizza, pasta, meat and fish all criss-cross the Italian capital,
where great wealth lives side by side with increasing desperation
caused by a sharp rise in unemployment and homelessness.
In the first few months of this year, Italians have had to cut
their spending on food by 3 percent. At the same time, 6 million
tonnes of perfectly good food are thrown out in the country every
year.
Pasto Buono so far includes about 30 restaurants, bars, patisseries
and delicatessens, including famous tiramisu maker Pompi.
“This initiative is very important. It channels the generosity of
shopkeepers and the needs of the poorest,” said Father Fabio
Bartoli, parish priest at San Benedetto, which feeds about 35
people a day.
Everyone contributes in whatever way they can.
Strabbioni, a trendy restaurant in the city center, makes six meals
three times a week for the homeless who sleep near Termini Railway
Station.
Tiro a Volo, the restaurant of an exclusive sports club, gives away
leftovers from its lavish Sunday buffets every Monday to a soup
kitchen at San Bellarmino.
“Sometimes it’s not enough, so I have asked them to prepare two
special plates of biscuits,” club director Michele Anastasio
Pugliese said.
At Volpetti, employees set aside leftovers in white cardboard boxes
every night for pick-up in the morning by a van from Caritas.
Volunteers say former middle-class Italians who have been hit hard
by the government’s austerity measures are among the “new poor”
coming to soup kitchens, while immigrants who used to attend have
left the country.
At the San Benedetto soup kitchen, 58-year-old Donato — one of the
“new poor” — is grateful.
“I used to be a jeweler, but I was badly in debt. Now I’ve lost
everything,” he said. “For the past two years, I’ve been sleeping
in my car. I come and eat here for lunch and in the evenings, I go
to the supermarket and steal bread.”
Charities complain that initiatives like Pasto Buono are limited
because of the red tape that potential donors have to deal
with.
“There is a bureaucracy,” Pasto Buono director Gregorio Fogliano
said in an interview, calling for new laws to simplify the
process.
“The eateries that have joined are top quality. These are people
who apart from wanting to do some good, also want to get rid of
unsold food,” he said.
His aim is to provide 110,000 meals a year in Rome.
The initiative began in Genoa in 2007 and is now up and running in
Florence as well. It plans to extend to Palermo, Sicily, in the
future.